RED BANK, NJ – Walker Consultants, a New York based parking design and consulting practice, presented a final study on their conclusions regarding the Borough’s parking challenges.

Background: On June 1st, 2018, Red Bank formed a partnership with the Red Bank RiverCenter and Walker Consultants. The Borough contracted with Walker Consultants for a fee of $52,350. The RiverCenter contributed $25,000.

Brian Bartholomew, Sr. Consultant with Walker, did indeed say that Red Bank’s “Parking program is broken.”

Along with colleague Carolyn Krasnow, Vice President, they went through a data-driven Power Point presentation, emphasizing that the slides and information were, “Provided in chronological and logical order (and), listed (from top to bottom) in terms of priorities. The list(s) are not a la’ carte, but are intertwined, the success of one program is related to the other.”

“What we came up with, is that there is no one person managing parking. There are a lot of hands managing parking…, to overcome that we are making a recommendation that a Parking Manager be hired.

“No development or re-development should be approved without the sign-off of the Parking Manager. We’re asking that the Parking Utility be empowered; that political influences are removed. If that can’t be done, maybe we need to look at creating a Parking Authority.”

“In addition, the Parking Authority should be a self-funding enterprise…, should not fall on the back of the residents, the cost should be a user-supported system,” said Bartholomew

Other Significant Recommendations:

Three-Year Cycle. Eliminate the transfer of surplus parking revenue to the general fund putting those monies back into the Parking Utility.

License Plate Recognition Program. This would entail parking enforcement cruising the parking lots snapping pictures of license plates. Those that had exceeded the time limit would be ticketed. “This would help to control costs, it’s simply a different method of tracking,” said Bartholomew

Private Sector Space. Encourage the Borough to work with the private sector land owners to come up with shared user agreements.

Extend Parking Meter Hours. After parking meter technology is updated, the paid parking enforcement hours would be extended to 9:00pm.

Convenience Pricing. Cost for parking during peak hours would increase on White, Broad and Monmouth Streets.

Parking Garages. Conduct a supply and demand analysis in two years to re-evaluate the parking conditions and need. Bartholomew said, “A lot of policies, procedures and pain are self-inflicted. We’d like to see you correct those issues prior to the development of any new parking inventory.”

A two-year implementation schedule was provided with estimated dollar values.

Ziad Shehady, Red Bank’s Business Administrator, defined the next steps as, “Meet with the parking committee of the mayor and council along with a stakeholder committee group of the RiverCenter and look at this implementation time line and figuring out how to put this plan into action. There’s the financial component. We have to develop a utility budget annually and look at the financial impact of these decisions.”

The audience which numbered well over fifty, asked numerous and pointed questions to Walker Consultants.

For an excellent PowerPoint summary of Walker's presentation, click HERE. Be sure to check out pages 18 thru 22, the "Operational Recommendations." And remember, the numbers are listed in priority of importance.

To view the video of the meeting, click HERE. The video was provided courtesy of Suzanne Viscomi.

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